May 05, 2008

Starting this week, I'll be joining the team at TriplePundit.com, a great new blog dedicated to exploring and celebrating an "integrated bottom-line" approach to business and life, where people, profit and the planet are inextricably linked. This is a close cousin of Sustainabill's people/place/planet theme, and of a piece with my work at the intersection of community development, environment and business, currently at BALLE and INC and, starting July 1, in my new post in sustainability at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business.

Sustainabill will continue to serve as my website and virtual storage space for my various odds and ends.

May 02, 2008

The buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts this week announced a new partnership with Environmental Defense to help measure the environmental performance of the dozens of businesses KKR owns, from Toys R Us to the energy giant TXU. The partnership grows out of the collaboration between the two groups last year in brokering a deal for TXU. ED agreed to support the acquisition by KKR of TXU in exchange for KKR and its partner, Texas Pacific Group, agreeing to reduce TXU's carbon emissions and scotch its plans to build new coal-burning power plants.

The evolution of the KKR-ED partnership mirrors a larger evolution underway for the past two decades in American environmentalism: the merger of market and environmental strategies. ED's President, Fred Krupp, has long been out front in pushing for what he and others have called "The Third Wave" of environmentalism, the latest iteration of the movement following its conservation and pollution control phases. Starting in the late 1980s, Fred and ED have taken a contrarian position vis. other national environmental NGOs in embracing market-based approaches to pollution reduction/elimination, especially emissions credit trading (cap-and-trade) schemes of the kind pioneered in the 1990 federal Clean Air Act.

ED's Third Wave-style environmentalism has come of age as awareness about the threat of global warming has grown in the last few years, especially among U.S. corporations. This, I would argue, is a good thing.
My concern about ED's approach today is the same as it was in 1989, when I invited Fred to present his Third Wave thesis to a group of faculty and students at my law school, where I headed the school’s Environmental Law Society (Disclaimer: Fred was a patient of my father's, a Connecticut doctor, at the time, which is how I got to know him). My beef with the Third Wave, much like the history of environmentalism itself, is that it still misses the bigger picture. In focusing on environmental performance alone, without consideration for what I would call social performance (the other bottom-line), ED is still promoting an old-school approach dressed up as cutting-edge.

In effect, ED's environmental Third Wave partnership with KKR sounds a lot like a vanilla double-bottom line strategy which, as I say, is fine for what it is. But it seems to me the real innovation opportunity, for ED and any other environmental group that wants to position itself as a market force and pathbreaker, is to develop and promote new, triple-bottom line metrics like B Lab's B Rating System, currently in beta form.

In my view, environmental groups in particular need to demonstrate that they not only understand but can operationalize an environmental worldview/strategy in which people, especially low- and middle-income folks, working folks, matter, a vision in which the way companies treat their employees and other stakeholders is seen as just as important a metric as how they treat their ecosystems.

This, of course, was one of the problems with 1990 Clean Air Act amendments and, for that matter, most market-based, cap-and-trade approaches. They tend to ignore place-based or local impacts; net overall emissions for a particular pollutant or set of pollutants might be reduced across an airshed or region, but they might also be concentrated in certain areas or among certain populations, like ones that happen to host older, dirtier facilities, which, not surprisingly, tend to be lower-income and politically weak communities of color. Clean places get cleaner while dirty ones stay dirty or get dirtier. This is the environmental justice critique of market-based approaches. They sound great in theory, but look more closely, at the finer grain (or finer particulates! remember the famous Harvard School of Public Health Six Cities study?), and you see that some people and some places still bear a disproportionate pollution burden.

ED’s company-by-company, plant-by-plant performance approach might well help remedy this externalities problem. If companies are making real, on-the-ground improvements in their environmental management practices everywhere they operate, workers and communities will necessarily benefit. However, the key is to make this social part of the measurement methodology explicit, patent, not incidental. In this way, ED and other environmentalists can do a lot to erode the notion that they’re elitists, happier to sit down at the table with Fortune 500 CEOs and Wall Street tycoons than alongside blue-collar, working folks.

The point is, it’s gotta be more than about just carbon; it’s gotta be about communities, about turning the double into a triple.

April 22, 2008

It's a no brainer. Bring an urban river back to life and people and businesses will follow. It's biological; we're drawn to water, no matter where or when. Just check out any urban playground with a water feature. Give a kid even a few drops squirting out of the tarmac and they'll frolic for hours.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that when officials and taxpayers in Oklahoma City decided a while back to restore their local waterway, the North Canadian River (newly renamed the Oklahoma River; the Army Corps had essentially eliminated the river from the landscape by redirecting its flow beginning in the 1920s), good things were soon to come. So far, the $54 million the city invested in the river's restoration has brought $700 million in new development along the waterfront. Even more compelling, the river has become a premier venue for watersports, from kayaking to sculling to canoeing. The Great Plains: A Rowers' Mecca. Go figure.

April 08, 2008

It's not just Rocky Mountain towns like Rifle, Colorado that are experiencing a gas and oil boom like few can remember. The Marcellus Shale, stretching from New York to Ohio to West Virginia, has long been known to hold lots of natural gas. Now, with better recovery technology and high gas prices, the rush to extract eastern gas is on. In Pennsylvania, the price of mineral rights leases went from $300 an acre in February to $2100 in April, according to a New York Times report. 20 companies are investing over $700 million to develop the resource.

It's an 19th/early 20th century redux, when Pennsylvania was the seat of coal and oil development, long before the west became the nation's energy basket. In this sense, the Marcellus Shale is a sprawling symbol of how little we've progressed in our energy diet, how, despite new, renewable technologies and the imperative of climate change, we're still quick to return to a pre-modern energy system when the law of supply and demand allows.

April 06, 2008

I love the simplicity of the Alliance for Climate Protection's logo. It captures the profound paradox that is the climate change challenge. Beneath the intractable complexity of the issue -- scientific, political, technological, social -- is the simple matter of collective action. Not that it's easy to move a community or society toward a particular goal, but it is the critical barrier. It is THE issue.

Which is why the ACP's $300 million campaign is so smart. It's about raising awareness, about getting people to identify the "We" in "Me" (the logo flipped upside down). This is, after all, the next great leap we must make in human consciousness if we, the species, are to avoid the kind of dismal fate that might well await us if climate change, population and poverty have their way. More on this trinity of global forces can be found in two new books by big picture thinkers Jeffrey Sachs and Lester Brown.

March 17, 2008

University of Vermont scientists are confirming what many have been suspecting over the last few years. Owing to a warming climate, the Northern Forest is changing, and fast. The transition zone separating the hardwood from conifer forest is Ground Zero for this transformation.

According to the Boston Globe, on Camel's Hump in Hunington, VT, UVM ecologist Brian Beckage has found that at 2600 feet, the heart of the transition zone, "cold-loving trees had declined from 43 percent to 18 percent. Northern
hardwoods increased from 57 percent to 82 percent. Overall, the entire
zone shifted upward several hundred feet." Talk about dramatic data! As a lover of red spruce and balsam fir, the green fringe of Vermont's Green Mountains and the tell-tale conifers of its summits, this news is like a dart to my heart.

This same passion prompted me to write the following essay in 2004 for the 10th Anniversary issue of Northern Woodlands magazine. Had I seen Beckage's data, not sure I would have been so casual in the piece.

Wine and WoodsNorthern Woodlands Magazine Summer 2004

I like wine -- a lush Napa Valley cabernet, a big Barolo, a white burgundy from Montrachet. It’s the earthiness, the taste as old as water. Which is why I happened to notice the fleet of Vermont varietals filling the shelves last summer, from the homeliest general store to the fanciest wine merchant in Burlington. Turns out winemaking in cooler regions like Vermont has gotten easier in recent years as temperatures around the globe have increased, about one degree on average since 1900 and more in the higher latitudes. Warm air causes sugar inside grapes to be released which in turn leads to ripeness, and wine.

In Vermont, the moderating effect on the area’s climate of Lake Champlain, around which most of the state’s vineyards can be found, has clearly helped local winemakers. But the recent rise in the number and quality of wines produced, and the stories from other winemaking regions like Oregon and Italy, which have seen dramatic improvements in their wines on account of sharply warmer temperatures, suggest that global climate change is also a factor.

Now as much as I like wine, I like trees better. I’m a woodlands guy, not a vineyarder. So I have to ask myself, if the region’s winemakers are benefiting from higher temperatures, what does this mean for our forests? After all, what climate change may give, it can also take away. In my view, the most significant change to New England’s woodlands in the last decade is the realization that climate change might fundamentally alter their make-up and use.

Take the maple sugar industry, for example. The delicate chemistry that regulates maple sap flows will likely be disrupted by warmer winter days and nights, reducing the amount and quality of sap produced. In addition, sugar maples and other tree species in the North Woods, especially the broadleaf trees, stand to be harmed by rising temperatures as severe ice storms, like the one in 1998, become more common, wreaking havoc on the forest canopy. This, in turn, will affect not only the wood products industry but the very look and feel of the forest.

I don’t know about you, but I like my North Woods just the way they are, remembering that it’s the region’s colder climate, among other key factors, that best distinguishes these forest ecosystems from their more temperate cousins to the south. I fear the effects climate change may bring, however uncertain they may be, and can only hope that as forest users we do all we can to keep what makes the North Woods the North Woods.

March 13, 2008

Another sign of the pastoralization of cities: the rise of vestpocket orchards in backyards from Brooklyn to LA. Home orcharding is the latest trend in support of urban localvores and greener, healthier cities. As one LA resident put it, “I have several friends in the neighborhood with established home orchards and we kind of share. You
get more fruit than you know what to do with. A
neighborhood where people know each other and share food—how un-big
city is that?” Pretty much sums it up.

On a related note, in Portland, Oregon, a group of social entrepreneurs calling themselves the Urban Fruit Tree Project is organizing local residents, including low-income and homeless people, to plant and maintain fruit trees on the city's streets, harvesting the produce as a source of food and revenue. Urban ecology meets economic development.

March 06, 2008

Two recent New York Times stories of note. Solar thermal facilities in the Nevada desert, a new kind of western land use. Sprawling farms of solar panels on the desert floor. Not without environmental impacts, such as the effects on biodiversity. Tortoises are one species at risk. The inevitable trade-offs. No development without downsides.

Ogden, Utah, an old manufacturing city of 87,000, is being remade as the outdoor sports capital of the country. Ski companies from around the world are locating their HQ in Ogden, turning old downtown buildings into modern, hip corporate offices, from the exposed brick to the reclaimed timbers. The town is even considering installing a gondola to carry skiers from downtown to the ski slopes above, blurring the boundary between business district and backcountry. A new commuter rail line from Salt Lake to Ogden will add to the city's growth. A real up-and-comer.

February 09, 2008

It's a long way from Levittown to Masdar City, and I don't just mean mileage. Where Masdar City is a model town for the oil-free, post-carbon age, the average American suburb is anything but.

Changes afoot? Perhaps, according to The Times's Alex Williams in his article, "Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You." Whereas the suburbs were once understood as the antidote to the environmental and social ills of the city, the pendulum has swung dramatically the other way over the last 15 years, leading, in many cases, to their (often unwarranted) demonization.

Safe to say that the march toward truly green, sustainable U.S. suburbs, as with any other communities, will be a long and difficult one. But every journey, Lao Tzu reminds us, begins with a single step. Or, in the case of the suburbs, a single bike lane or hybrid car.

February 07, 2008

With all the talk of individuals, businesses and communities making the shift to green, here's a little reality check from Felicity Barringer in today's New York Times. This is where the rubber hits the road, where talk becomes walk. Not surprisingly, the gritty details of going green can be expensive and socially/politically challenging! Whether it's 4 v. 6 cylinders for police cars or solar panels in your subdivision, old habits die hard. As I learned in law school, stateways can't change folkways, not quickly anyway. . .